Introducing Kaggle Prospect

A great data scientist not only knows how to answer a question, they know what questions to ask.

With the launch of Kaggle Prospect, we are bringing the Kaggle community in on contest design at its earliest stages. The potential host will release a sample of their data and Kagglers will have the opportunity to explore the data, post comments and initial analyses, and propose ideas for what Kaggle contests they would like to see based on this dataset.

Other community members will be able to see these proposals, comment, and up-vote their favorites, Hacker News style. Winning ideas will be determined from the proposals with the most votes by a panel of judges consisting of data scientists from the host organization and the Kaggle data science team. And yes, there will be prizes for the winning proposals.

COMING SOON - Keep an eye on this blog for the announcement of the first prospecting challenge later this morning.

I can’t count the number of times that I, as a Kaggle data scientist, have a version of this conversation with a potential competition host:

Host: I want to run a Kaggle competition.

Me: Great, tell me more about your predictive modeling needs.

Host: Well, I have a lot of data …

Moral of the story: If you want to do data-mining, you first have to know where to dig. We can't wait to see the ideas you come up with on Kaggle Prospect. Construct, contribute, play nice, be bold.

Hi Margit,
There are various Meet-up groups here in the Twin Cities that attract a variety of talented people interested in participating in Big Data, predictive modelling on a grand scale, visualization of complexity, etc. The groups include R language groups, visualization per se, and I assume that Hadoop will be the subject of a group soon.

No one person of the people I have met in these groups could respond to the full challenge of formulating questions for a big data set, conditioning the data, coding the scripts or base routines, collating the outputs, designing the visual and writing the verbal reports that would accompany this task. On the other hand, they have the energy and motivation.

Perhaps the hacker hives sprouting up out West can provide or host a form of organization that would address this problem...quasi-Big Bang cohorts. Or Stanford dorms.

On the other hand, I imagine a little seeding at the structural level might not hurt. I know it would make a big difference here in the Midwest where the talent but not the transitional culture is available.

I propose that your company convene a series of local Meet-ups that would
1. Identify those interested
2. Convene them and give them a structure to identify their strengths and gaps
3. Provide resources organized along self-teaching lines for filling gaps in method and principle.

As a retiree I have some time to participate but probably not to sponsor such a project.
Just a thought.